


wrath

by blondeslytherin



Series: seven deadly sins [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Arguing, Breakups, Emotional Hurt, Flashbacks, Fluff, Heavy Angst, I Love You, M/M, Unhappy Ending, god this hurt me to write, happy ending for the series as a whole tho, or how not to say i love you, that's why its short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 02:43:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21008417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blondeslytherin/pseuds/blondeslytherin
Summary: wrath: extreme anger~~~“Why can’t you say it!” Lance shouts.“Why are you trying to force me!?” Keith shouts back.“Because it’s not that goddamn hard to tell me that you love me!”“Yes, Lance, it is!”“Why? Why is it so goddamn hard to tell me that you love me? Is it because you don’t?”Keith freezes.





	wrath

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all! long time no see (for this series at least). sorry i've been kinda flaky with this series, this particular one was kind of difficult for me to write so i needed to be in a certain state of mind to get it out. also, very heavy angst and emotional things in this one, i kinda cried while writing it so that should give a fair heads up.
> 
> thank you all so much for the continued love and support <3 your comments mean more to me than i could ever express
> 
> comments and kudos are loved and appreciated <3

They break like this: not all at once, tearing apart like a bullet through cartilage; but hairline cracks, formed over time by all the words unsaid.

It’s dark in Lance’s apartment. The blinds are still open, evidence of how deep they’ve fallen. No lamps have been turned on, none of Lance’s favorite candles have been lit.

Keith thinks that if there had been light in the room, maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did. Maybe it all would have gone differently, if he could see the blue of his eyes and caved the way he wished he could. Maybe it all would have been different.

But there’s no light, not tonight.

They aren’t speaking. Keith wants to think it’s because they don’t have any words left but he knows it’s because Lance happens to still have a shred of self-control, enabling him to keep the scathing words at bay.

Keith is just empty. He doesn’t have any words left to say.

So they sit in the silence, building, building, building to a sweeping crescendo…

The music swells only inside of the roaring in his head, as Keith thinks back on what got them here.

He and Lance had fought before. Everyone fights—it’s only healthy, in many respects. Petty squabbles about the dishes in college, arguments regarding who went home and changed when they matched, fights about more serious things.

They didn’t start with a fight.

If he had to pick any one moment where he could truly identify where things had begun to go wrong, it was the morning after they had first slept together. You know, _that _one. The one where he wished things would never change from inside those sheets and in each other’s arms.

Eventually, they had gotten up for breakfast. Keith cooked while Lance showered and came out smelling like coconut and something coastal. He had wrapped his arms around Keith’s middle as he made scrambled eggs (the only thing he knew he could make without fucking it up). Kissed his neck like they did this every morning, whispered something soft in his ear in Spanish.

_“What’d you say?” Keith murmured, melting like butter in Lance’s arms as he felt his boyfriend smile against him. _

_He only repeated it, and giggled. Keith was too enraptured to give a shit._

_They ate breakfast like any domestic couple did—god, they were domestic—and Keith smiled at him over a glass of water, eyes mapping his face the way his mouth did the night before. _

_“Stop that,” Lance said, a laugh in his words. _

_“Stop what?” asked Keith. _

_“Looking at me like that. It makes me think…”_

_“Makes you think what?”_

_Lance blushed. “I—never mind. It doesn’t matter.”_

_Keith considered pressing the topic but Lance switched conversations so quickly that Keith forgot all about it. _

_They cleaned up after breakfast and spent the day being lazy around various parts of the house, all the way up until Hunk arriving for a visit and kicking Keith out without saying anything. _

_Lance walked him to the door, Keith’s overnight bag in one hand and the other in Keith’s own. He kissed him at the door, and there was that face again—like Lance wanted to say something but didn’t have the words for it. Instead, another phrase in Spanish that sounded so good coming from Lance’s mouth that he didn’t have the mind to wonder about what it meant._

_One last look, and Keith was on his way out._

But now he’s back in the present, eyes unfocused in the shadows at where he thinks the rug is, stirring at the sound of Lance’s voice.

“I just… just help me understand.”

“I’ve said it enough times, Lance.”

He hasn’t. He knows he hasn’t.

Lance is talking but Keith isn’t listening as he keeps _thinking. _About all the times he should have been better and wasn’t.

It kept on like that; little Spanish phrases and long looks that Keith can’t quite puzzle out and the way everything feels different now.

_“Did you make it home okay?” Lance’s voice is grainy coming through the phone, the five miles between them feeling so much larger but sill so intimate._

_“Yeah,” Keith replies. “Drove under the speed limit, just like you asked me to,” he lies._

_“Good.” _

_The line is quiet._

_“Keith?”  
“Yeah?”_

_“I love you.” _

_It almost sounds pained, the way Lance says it, like he’s taking everything Keith feels and putting it into his own voice. _I love you_ sounds more like heartbreak than a proclamation of joy. _I love you _wasn’t said the way the couple says it in movies, but rather like it took everything from him instead of giving it all back._

_“I know,” is what Keith says through the thickness of his throat. _

_And he does. He does know Lance loves him. But knowing someone loves you won’t always erase the doubts in your own mind that say you’re not worthy of such love, and do they really love someone like you?_

_The line is quiet._

_“I think I should probably head to bed,” Keith says. “I have to work on another big case file again.”_

_“Yeah,” Lance says, sounding just like ‘I love you.’ “No big, I understand.”_

_“Good night, Lance.”_

_“Night, darling.”_

Lance sniffles in the darkness, twice, and then clears his throat. Keith knows he’s crying. Lance knows he’s crying.

Neither of them do anything about it.

“I just… it makes me feel like you don’t want to be with me.”

_No. God no. I want to be with you more than anything._

His mouth and his mind have stopped communicating as his heart seems to stop beating.

_There’s a kid in the backseat of his car. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s driving him down dark roads, the only light coming from his headlights. He can see four feet ahead, maybe five._

_He’s driving nearly blind on this road after midnight, and the kid in the backseat hasn’t said a word._

_“I’m going to ask you one more time,” Keith says, unable to keep the exhaustion out of his voice. “And then I’ll drop the subject until morning. What happened tonight, kid? I thought we said this time was going to be a little different.”_

_He’s silent—typical. The kid doesn’t open up to anyone and Keith is the rare exception to have him talk on a good day. This isn’t a good night._

_“They said they loved me.”_

_Keith holds his tongue._

_“They said they loved me, and I didn’t know what to say back. I don’t love them, and they haven’t known me long enough to love me like they say. But… they told me I had to say it back. And I didn’t want to say something like that only for them to take it away. So I didn’t. And they didn’t like it.”_

_Keith takes a deep breath in unison with his charge. “And that’s how we got here, huh?”_

_“Yeah.”_

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Lance.”

“You know exactly what I want you to say!”

“What happened to not pressuring me?”

“You don’t have to say it in those exact three words in order to get the feeling across Keith, and you’ve barely given me that.”

“God, I can’t take this anymore.”

“So where do we go from here, huh? C’mon Keith, I’m sure you know that at least.”

Keith looks up then, from where he had been staring at his fingers, twisted so tight they had gone white. He can just barely make out Lance’s figure in the darkness, hunched with his shoulders at his ears and trembling.

He’s shaking like a fucking leaf and Keith has barely moved all night.

_Lance is a mover in his sleep. Always has been, always will be. Keith knew it for a long time, mainly in their college days and all the nights Keith would lay awake listening to Lance toss and turn from his dreams. And then they went their separate ways; Keith on his own, Lance with Hunk. They kept in contact, they were best friends after all, but Keith didn’t think about Lance’s night movements. _

_Then they were all together again, and Lance is laughing when he bowls a strike and Allura is resting her chin on her elbows while they both watch him. _

_“Has he always moved that much in his sleep?”_

_“What?”  
“Lance. He moves in his sleep.”_

_“And why exactly are you asking-slash-telling me about that?”_

_“You lived with him in college, yes?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Surely you must have heard him move in his sleep. It’s atrocious.”_

_“It’s really not that bad,” he all but growls. He’s defensive of Lance, sue him._

_Allura scoffs. “Then you’ve clearly never slept with him.”_

_“Well, yeah, we’ve only ever been friends. Why would I sleep with him? There have always been enough beds.” He laughs, and it sounds awful to his own ears. “If you’re complaining so much about it, why are you still with him?”_

_Allura gives him a side eye. “We make sacrifices for the ones we love. If mine is putting up with Lance moving while he sleeps, so be it.”_

_They turn back just in time to see Lance bust out some truly terrible dance moves as he gloats about his leading score in bowling. _

_Keith takes a long sip of his drink._

Lance stands up, wrapping his arms around himself in some kind of shield, as if that will protect him from their fight.

“Keith,” is all he says.

Keith can’t say his name. _I hate this, I hate hurting you, you have to know that Lance but I can’t, you can’t force me and I can’t make myself say it because what happens—what happens—what happens—_

“Why can’t you say it!”

“Why are you trying to force me!?”

“Because it’s not that goddamn hard to tell me that you love me!”

“Yes, Lance, it is!”

“Why? Why is it so goddamn hard to tell me that you love me? Is it because you don’t?”

Keith stares at him, mouth open. They both on their feet now, the smallest gap apart that’s entirely insurmountable. Lance’s arms are wound even tighter and Keith doesn’t know how he’s breathing. Doesn’t know how either of them are breathing because it feels like all of the air is gone. It feels like he’s drowning and he can’t say a thing because the only person who would want to save him won’t even look him in the eye across the darkness.

_They’re in bed. Sheets wrapped around their waists, Keith’s arm around Lance’s torso. He knows he’ll be sore in the morning, but it’s worth it. For the calm of the aftermath, their soft bubble in a world that doesn’t want them. It’s perfect, right here and right now._

_Keith thinks he might be in love. _

_It’s the first time he’s even allowed himself to think of it, with the very much present modifier in that mental statement. Might. He might be in love. He’s not even sure that he is but it finally exists as a possibility._

_Lance’s head dips up and down with each inhale and exhale Keith has. Moving in sync with their beating hearts, intertwined in only the way lovers can be._

_And he knows they’re lovers. Lovers, even though it has the word love in it, is something he can say. _

_They make love. It’s a horrible and yucky statement mainly for the cliché of it all but sometimes that’s the way it feels. Beyond fucking. Beyond something casual, beyond even intimacy. _

_They’re lovers. _

_Keith thinks he might be in love with Lance._

_“Keith?”_

_“Mm?”_

_“I love you.”_

_It’s so casual, the way it slips out. In English this time, too. He says it like it’s a fact, like it’s utterly indisputable to the world that Lance loves Keith. _

_“I know,” is all Keith can ever say. _

_Their bubble feels a little less calm, a little less like a sanctuary. Some of the outside world has begun to seep in, along with their ideas that when someone says they love you, you must say it back. Keith hasn’t ever been on the other side, telling someone he loves them only for them to not say it back, so he can’t imagine what Lance must be feeling. But he has to know—he has to know that Keith might love him. He has to know._

_It’s on the tip of his tongue, modifier and all. _

_He’s so close to saying it. _

_“Lance…”_

_His head shifts so that blue meets violet and the words are there, they’re right fucking there he just needs to say them, he just needs to say that he think he might love Lance and have it all out in the world and maybe then those blue eyes won’t look like that he just needs to say it—_

_“You’re everything,” is what he says instead. _

_Lance seems to melt against him and Keith feels everything trembling on a tightrope, his entire world balancing on the shoulders of an inexperienced acrobat._

_Lance snuggles back down and Keith stares at the ceiling, trying to regain that steady breathing again, his eyes burning._

_Lance is his everything. Everything and everything and all in between, belongs to Lance. And he belongs to Lance in turn and Keith doesn’t think he found home until home had blue eyes and a winning smile, smelling like coconuts on a summer day. He fell into step next to perfection and learned perfection wasn’t everything but Lance was. _

_Lance is everything to him._

_And when everything is just one man, one boy playing at adult, everything is so much bigger than nothing._

_Keith doesn’t want nothing, anymore. He wants his everything, and if everything wants nothing, Keith won’t have anything._

_Keith might just love Lance._

“Don’t you dare think that I don’t care about you.”

“Caring about me isn’t the same as loving me!” Lance shouts.

He’s entirely still, even as his soul seems to shudder under the weight of the insult. “I care about you, more than I ever have about anyone else. You have to know that, Lance.”

“And I do. I _know _you care about me but you don’t always fucking show me and I’ve been in enough relationships to know when I’m the one who loves someone more. When I’m the one putting in all the effort, crying and crying because I’m not enough, again. I’m too much, I love too much, and you can’t say it because you don’t love me enough.”

It guts him.

_You don’t love me enough._

_You don’t love me enough._

“Do you really think that?” Keith whispers.

There are no lights on in Lance’s apartment. No moonlight coming in from the windows, none of Lance’s favorite candles lit. There’s nothing to show him the utter lie written on Lance’s face as he says, “yes.”

“How dare you,” Keith says. “How dare you say that I don’t love you enough when I’ve never even told you that I do.”

It burns him to say it. The insult seems to sting on its way out and that’s the only possible explanation for the way his throat burns and his eyes sting.

Lance makes a noise that Keith can’t begin to describe other than something of breaking.

_This is how it ends._

“Then why are we still here?” Lance manages. “Why are we still us?”

They never tell you that the worst kinds of fights aren’t the loud ones. They’re the ones where wrath is the only thing you feel at first until every other emotion you’ve been holding back comes shoving forward. The ones where tears are running down your face in the darkness and there’s nothing to stop them because your hands are balled at your sides for fear you might hurt something you can’t heal.

They never tell you it hurts the most to lose everything in pieces rather than all at once.

Here’s where he’s supposed to say it. Tell Lance he loves him and that he still wants to be them, wants everything for them.

But words like that—you don’t get to take back words like that. In the emptiness of the aftermath the words will still be there. In the too big bed with cold sheets, those words will be all he hears. In every place Lance used to occupy, they ricochet off the walls and strike him like a punch to the chest. In the aftermath of it all—when it all falls apart—those words will still be there. Haunting him. Mocking him.

“I—I can’t, Lance.”

He can’t take those three words back, either.

“Then this is it,” Lance says, voice breaking. “We’re done?”

“I guess so.”

Lance is crying, Keith can hear it but the gap is too big, the distance is too much, and Lance may be Keith’s everything but to Lance, Keith is nothing.

He takes his keys out of his jacket pocket without a word, shrugs the coat on.

Opens the front door and closes it gently behind him.

For the first time in what feels like forever, Lance doesn’t tell him he loves him when he says goodbye.

Lance doesn’t say anything at all.

And Keith leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> if you've made it this far, i'll give you this: the series WILL have a happy ending. but really, i couldn't write seven deadly sins without some angst. also if you've been following any of my other works, you might think i'm a bit of a sadist (i promise i'm not. i just like making myself cry over my favorite boys). 
> 
> thank you so much for reading (and hopefully enjoying). there will be two more works in this series, and if you need another comfort thing, there will be no more (heavy) angst in either of the final two works.
> 
> (sorry again for putting y'all through so much)
> 
> come shout at me @:  
tumblr: [blondeslytherin](https://blondeslytherin.tumblr.com/)  
insta: blondeslytherine


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